News: Compuware Pushes dynaTrace to get their APM 4 Product out the Door

Less than a month after acquiring dynaTrace, Compuware has managed to strong arm the development team to finally release version four of their flagship, application performance management platform.

Okay, maybe that’s not quite the truth. Maybe there wasn’t any ‘strong arming.’ And the release of version four less than a month after the Compuware acquisition is purely coincidental. But it has been about two years since the previous dynaTrace release. It does beg the questions as to why version four has taken this long to come along.

“Basically, we’ve been busy improving dynaTrace 3 for the past two years.” Says John Van Siclen, CEO of dynaTrace. “We’ve continued to do incremental releases as we add improvements and new functionality. But we didn’t feel there were significant enough changes to justify a full version release. With version four, there are enough, significant architectural changes in dynaTrace to justify the full version increment.”

And what is this big architectural improvement? Apparently it’s a secret sauce they’ve branded as PurePath Technology®. What does it do? Something about “capturing timing and code level context for all transactions, end-to-end, from user click, across all tiers, to the database of record and back” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Without direct hands on experience with version 4, it’s difficult to know exactly how well the reality melds with the marketing, but one of the reasons dynaTrace is liked so much as both a product and a company is due to the fact that they tend to deliver on their promises. And what is the promise? The promise is that they deliver some great tools for managing and monitoring performance from the perspective of the user, as opposed to most tools that simply provide a data-centric view.

And what does that mean? Well, it means that a tool like 'dynaTrace 4' is becoming more and more desirable for individuals tasked with managing and monitoring enterprise applications. Web 2.0 interfaces are more common than ever, and back-end performance tools aren’t very good at telling you about what is going on with your JavaScript – but dynaTrace is. And as data centers get deployed to the cloud, and the infrastructure isn’t owned and managed by those doing the debugging, having tools that can monitor the parts of the application where the developer actually does have control are more important than ever.

Still, it's kinda a fun thought to think that the brass at Compuware is putting the gears to the boys at dynaTrace, pushing them to improve one of the most popular application performance management platforms on the market. Maybe a version five before the end of the year?Read the Press Release

"it’s a secret sauce they’ve branded as PurePath Technology®. "
Cameron can we for once get stop propagating this marketing nonsense. JDBInsight the forerunner to JXInsight/OpenCore released in 2000 has transaction path analysis.
Here is a very very old and now a little bit embrassing screenshot of JDBInsight 2.0 which shows transaction paths- http://www.jinspired.com/images/whatsnew-views-thumbnails.gif
This was then extended in JXInsight 3.0 to include distributed context across CORBA/RMI/JMS,....
We can't stop the marketing guys pushing this out but TSS editors should do a little bit research before giving credit to a company that only marketed it better than the company (or companies) that pioneered it.

I think the 'blahs' in the piece were intended to demonstrate that the desciption was a regurgitation of what was coming from marketing. The PurePath stuff has some interesting features as well, some of which sound pretty innovative and I'll be checking it out.

Indeed, the article stops short of asserting that dynaTrace was the first to market with certain features. But what features and improvements are included are of interest to dynaTrace users, which tends to be popular with TSS readers according to our annual survey.

That being said, we've got a good deal of users that are pretty enamoured with JXInsight as well.

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